GREATER Western Sydney coach Adam Kingsley hasn’t ruled out putting a tagger on St Kilda superstar Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera despite the unavailability of his No.1 stopper, Toby Bedford.
Bedford is at least two weeks away from a return, along with fellow senior regulars Aaron Cadman and Brent Daniels, but the success of Collingwood and Melbourne in restricting Wanganeen-Milera’s output in the opening two rounds hasn’t gone unnoticed.
“We opted not to tag last week, and we haven’t tagged for quite a while now. And our best tagger, in my opinion, is Toby Bedford, who’s not playing for us. So that’s been a little bit more difficult just to go to that,” Kingsley told reporters on Thursday.
“And I felt we managed there, what statistics over the last 12 months would say, and certainly the unanimous best on ground against the Lions a week earlier in Ed Richards, I thought we managed him extremely well.
“Unfortunately, we didn’t manage to restrict (Marcus) Bontempelli’s impact in that first half. So we’ll certainly look at it. We haven’t tagged [Wanganeen-Milera] in the past, but it feels like the last two weeks his impact has been restricted. And so we’ll have to decide whether we tag, who to do it with without Toby in the team, how it gets done.”
Kingsley said he was leaning towards giving the 23 players who succumbed to the Bulldogs a chance at redemption against the Saints this weekend, in what will be the Giants’ last game at their Engie Stadium home until round nine.
“I’d expect to be unchanged … I think it’s important that we trust our guys. We’ve trusted them for a long time,” he said.
“Yeah, we didn’t play well last week, but that wasn’t just a few. That was most, and I don’t think we need to make a scapegoat out of any of our players.
“So I trust them to give the kind of effort that we expect here at the Giants, and we’ll see that on Saturday.”
Kingsley was impressed with the Giants’ efforts at training on Thursday, with star midfielder Finn Callaghan in full flight after he battled to train fully ahead of the Bulldogs clash last week.
“It was probably our best session for the year in terms of the intent, the speed with which we trained at, the effort. So that’s all I want to see and everything else unfolds from that,” he said.
“(I’m) pretty confident with this group, pretty happy with the way that they’ve been going, aside from last week.”
